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- Russia in my lifetime : a tragic story Central Moscow in April 1992 was a jumble sale. Trestle tables obstructed the pavements, old counterpanes covered them. Mostly older people, mostly women, displayed trinkets for sale: a cup, a few beads, a spare tin. Outside the Bolshoi Theatre sheet music – bound conductors’ scores even– waited for a chance buyer. They were like cultural treasure turned out of safe-keeping by a marauding army. Over in Sokolniki park at the Sunday market Red Army uniforms were going for a song. The entire Soviet past was ridiculed. It made me feel uncomfortable. I cast my mind back twenty years earlier to my first contact with Communist Russia, when a planeload of young Western visitors who should have known better applauded when we took off for home again. Mostly they didn’t like the food. In Nizhny Novgorod I knew a woman who had been an Intourist travel guide. She knew her lines by heart. ‘You tell the visitor so much they don’t need to ask questions. Isn’t that right, Lesley?’ Galya had a nervous breakdown when both her technique and her beloved knowledge of Soviet history and culture were made redundant overnight. The Cold War, and its end, were a painful business.
- The Old Men at the Zoo: Novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) on the Riot of post-war Britain
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Monthly Archives: January 2013
Down and Out in Paris and London, or was that London and Scotland?
Over on Radio Four they’re reading Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London this week. After I’d written the fourth chapter of Anyone’s Game it was an echo of Orwell’s title, ‘Down and Out in London and Scotland’ came … Continue reading
Tennis and Other Games
Some years ago I invented a parlour game. An aunt of mine once submitted a board game based on the chemical elements to a manufacturer only to have it turned down as too complicated. Mine was straightforward. It was based … Continue reading
Art, Reality and a Terrible Accident
When a helicopter crashed in Central London early this year – January 16th, to be precise – I tuned into eye-witness accounts. The main witness, nearby at the time, was more taken with his own experience of the event than … Continue reading
Posted in Britain Today, Current Affairs, Philosophy and Philosophers
Tagged Derrida, Plato
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Lesley Chamberlain 